[Gllug] Making FTP look like a windows filesystem

[Mike Brodbelt]

andrew Black wrote:
> I colleague of mine has suggested using
> http://www.webdrive.com/products/webdrive/index.html
> to allow windows user to read/write an (S)FTP server as if it were a
> network share.
> 
> My gut feeling is that this won't quite work.   Somewhere lurking under
> the carpet will be a gotcha. Any got any thoughts on this.

The main gotcha I've had with these sorts of things in the past is where
you give a user access to a website via FTP. They get all confused
because the Windows shell view doesn't show case faithfully, so they end
up with mixed case filenames that don't work on the Unix webserver, and
they can't see why on their Windows machine.

It might be worth using a good GUI FTP client like Filezilla instead.
Using a shell extension tends to make people believe the filesystem
semantics will be the same as their local Windows drive - forcing them
to use a dedicated FTP program tends to make them go in without so many
assumptions.

That said, these things can work well, in the right situtation...

Mike

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